Here I show that diet can drive the profound difference between short lived summer bees and long lived off season bees. Caloric restriction can radically extend lifespan in a variety of organisms, so the minimal food consumption of the colony during dearth would extend lifespan. Conversely, the high protein diet of nurse bees, which use the protein mostly to produce food for the young, could radically shorten their lifespan. These same bees would then become short lived foragers. It has already been shown that bees tend to begin foraging in response to various impairments such as aging, disease, or even exposure to CO2. 

> Diet can have a profound effect on lifespan and on physiological and metabolic features relevant to aging. Most notably, the practice of dietary restriction -- reduced intake of macronutrients in the absence of severe nutritional deprivation -- can extend lifespan.  Protein limitation in the honeybee may mirror dietary restriction and that the effective longevity response to limited protein intake may be mediated by DNA methylation.

Honeybees and cell lines as models of DNA methylation and aging in response to diet
Experimental Gerontology Available online 28 July 2012

> We show that (i) restriction to high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets decreased worker lifespan by up to 10-fold; (ii) reduction in lifespan on such diets was mainly due to elevated intake of protein rather than lack of carbohydrate; and (iii) only one day of exposure to a high-protein diet had dire consequences for workers and the colony, reducing population size by more than 20 per cent.

Ant workers die young and colonies collapse when fed a high-protein diet
Proc. R. Soc. B 22 June 2012 vol. 279 no. 1737  2402-2408

Additionally

> The most prevalent hypothesis concerning the relationship between reproduction and longevity predicts that reproduction is costly, particularly in females. This may apply to some short-lived species such as Drosophila, but not to some long-lived species such as the queens of ants and bees. Bee queens lay up to 2000 eggs a day for several years, but they nevertheless live at least 20 times longer than their sisters, the sterile workers. 

> Two major mechanisms may have been largely overlooked, namely epigenetic control of longevity by imprinting through DNA methylation as suggested by recent data in the honey bee, and especially, a mechanism of which the principles are outlined here, the progressive weakening of the "electrical dimension" of cells up to the point of total collapse, namely death.

Longevity and aging in insects: Is reproduction costly; cheap; beneficial or irrelevant? A critical evaluation of the “trade-off” concept
Journal of Insect Physiology Volume 57, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 1–11

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